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https://github.com/migueldeicaza/TweetStation

MonoTouch based Twitter client
https://github.com/migueldeicaza/TweetStation

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MonoTouch based Twitter client

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README 

        
TweetStation



	TweetStation was originally a sample program that I created

	for my own use.  I was a fan of the older UI in Echofon and

	liked many of the elements of Tweetie2, but like every

	programmer, I wanted to make some changes.



	It was also a test bed for testing APIs and answering

	MonoTouch users's questions.  It is the original application

	that lead to the creation of MonoTouch.Dialog, as I figured

	that there should be a better way of constructing dialog boxes

	than creating models and delegates left and right.



	TweetStation is an open source, MIT X11 licensed twitter

	client written for MonoTouch.   See the file LICENSE for

	details.



	I setup a web site at: http://tirania.org/tweetstation as

	the oficial user-centric web site for TweetStation.



	The official description for the app is on TweetStation.txt



Building

========



	To build TweetStation, you will need a side-by-side

	MonoTouch.Dialog release, since they are co-developed,

	you will likely need the latest version.



Design Goals

============



   These design goals are just some basic principles, but like any

   other project, they change depending on my mood each day or when

   faced with harsh realities.



   The Murray Hill Style



	For years researchers from Bell Labs at Murray Hill published

	various computer books on C, Unix, compilers and design that

	were incredibly succinct.   They were amazing pieces of code

	that were short and concise.  I call this style of code the

	Murray Hill style.



	The TweetStation code was not designed to be incredibly

	extensible or reusable as-is.   I wrote this code to be succinct

	and short, if it is reusable for other projects it is an 

	unintended side effect.



	If you want to reuse code from TweetStation, you will likely

	want to alter it to suit your needs.



   Exceptions



	The code uses try/catch extensively in the code in areas that

	have to process data from twitter, I assume that the data

	might be broken or that my original assumptions or their

	documentation might be wrong.  You will notice in the code

	that all exceptions are printed out, I want to keep that this

	way for that reason.



   MonoTouch.Dialog



	Most of the UI was created with MonoTouch.Dialog and various

	custom views and Elements designed for twitter.  There is not

	a single UITableView coded in the traditional style.



   Memory Usage



	In some parts of the code I tried to minimize memory usage by

	not creating thousands of objects that would be thrown out

	(Tweet parsing for example), so I just recycle some instances

	sometimes.



	The ImageStore is also specialized for Twitter use, for instance

	the keys kept in the cache and on the file system are keyed by

	a long value and not by the URL, so we are not forced to keep

	the strings for the Urls in memory.



	A general purpose image downloader/cache would use URLs or

	something else.



   Singletons



	There are a handful of singleton classes as well, I tend to

	reset those instead of creating new instances as they would

	avoid creating expensive objects or objects that are known to

	leak in CocoaTouch anyways.



   Pending Task Queue



	I never know if a tweet has been starred or not when there is

	no network connectivity.   With TweetStation all the pending

	requests are kept in a queue and flushed at periodic intervals.



	This is used both to post tweets and favorite posts, allowing

	the settings to take place right away, even if there is no

	network connectivity



Implementation Notes

====================



	In the original TweetStation, I ended up doing a of database

	operations on the main thread, as opposed to doing it on a

	background thread.



	I am moving towards locking the Database.Main to allow the

	parsing of initial tweets to take place in the background



OAuth and xAuth

===============



	TweetStation supports both OAuth and xAuth authentication from

	twitter.   Currently the source code is hardcoded to the values

	that I obtained by registering my app at:



		http://dev.twitter.com/apps



	It uses OAuth by default and it does this by opening an embedded

	UIWebView to let the user enter their login and password and 

	granting the user authorization over at Twitter's site.



	To improve the experience, Twitter offers access to xAuth, but

	this requires application developers to request from Twitter

	special access, you can enable this for your code if you

	negotiate this.